For over 2 weeks now, farmworkers in different areas of the Western Cape have been striking. This is a spontaneous strike driven by workers on the ground in response to decades and decades of brutality at the hands of farmers and a government that has thus far refused to listen to workers and transform the rural landscape characterised by dependency master-slave relations, racism, sexism, starvation wages and violations of the limited freedoms won from decades of working class struggle. Farmworkers do backbreaking work sometimes for 12 hours a day to produce food and wine for everybody in this country and countries overseas yet they are forced to work under unsafe and unhealthy conditions, to drink dirty water, live without electricity, live without toilet facilities, on poverty wages, suffer threats of evictions, and violent physical and verbal abuse and intimidation at the hands of the bosses.read full story / add a comment